Why Change Fails to Stick

Management comes up with great plans for sweeping change, it implements the plans, and three years later the organization has reverted to the way it was before the initiative. Changing to new breakthrough systems is hard; maintaining those processes and procedure is far more difficult. The reason progressive ideas can have a successful implementation only to have the organization regress to its prior state a few years later has its roots in societal practices and human nature.

Successful Change

Successful corporate change requires a management charter, funding for education, walking the talk, and integration into the corporate fabric. All of these are rooted in management. The genesis of the idea may be from anywhere in the organization, but management must sponsor and support the change through actions, not just words.

Change is difficult and the chances of successfully implementing the best of changes is very low. The entire organization takes part in implementing change; however, management carries it forward making it happen. Without management's commitment squarely behind the initiative, it will fail. Success is hard fought and available only to the best. The managers that achieves it must reap significant a reward.

Rewarding Success

Most firebrands that drive change have little interest in doing the mundane task of maintaining the process. They need the next challenge. Corporate culture provides this through promotion. Financial incentives help, but the stature of a new title or office announces the success to everyone. If the reward is not commensurate with the goals of the change agent, he or she will look for new opportunities outside the present organization. Regardless, shortly after the change has been deemed successful, the people responsible for the accomplishment necessarily leave its sphere of influence. Compounded by the normal influx of new employees, all of whom need training in these non-standard concepts, the corporate fabric around the change begins to fray. The desire for comfort brings more passive-aggressive pressure on the system quickly reverting it back to its original state.

Changing of the Guard

Recently a well-respected, forward-thinking, dynamic leader I know left an organization they had been running of many years. During his tenure he had made significant changes. The accomplishments included transforming the IT applications development group into a well-tuned, high-performance team. That team is still growing and embraces change. One of the many changes completed was moving from a waterfall project management methodology for application development to an agile approach. Many managers struggled to understand the value in failing early and that the list of items started at the beginning of the year were not necessarily the list completed at the end of the year. Their tried and true methods of measuring success were no longer valid. In this new paradigm, a successful year could deliver nothing if the teams determine in early iterations that there was insufficient value for the business. It remains to be seen whether the new management, unfamiliar with agile, let alone IT, will continue to use agile. This will worsen as the company hires other new team members and the expenses in training increase. Shortsighted management considers training low hanging fruit when trying to reduce overhead costs. The new leadership needs to look at the system as a whole, instead of trying to squeeze pennies out of individual pieces—unraveling it slowly, thread by thread.

Holding Change

It is human nature to resist change. The norm is comforting. Each of us subconsciously oppose it, and when the pressure to maintain it lessens, we drift back to the our old ways. This is exacerbated when we are thrown into a strange environment that needs quick action. We resort to what is tried and true—the comfortable—implementing processes and procedures from our past. These actions could replace new and innovative solutions that are unfamiliar to us and we simply do not comprehend there value. We need to take pause and understand the environments we walk into and only revert when there is evidence of failure.

Related items

Process is at the core of any business. It makes work predictable, repeatable, and transferable. Without it we cannot scale our businesses. However, process can be a bane to making progress. Processes that work for a $10 million company have difficulties supporting a $30 million company. Trying to scale them to a $300 million company will not only fail but not address the issues that larger companies have that were never dreamt of in a smaller organization. Processes need to be discarded, revamped, and built—all of that without creating an overburdening bureaucracy.

Anytime you need to go someplace, you first have to know where you are. Processes are never static and your company's current state is probably far from where you think it is. Hence, the first step is mapping out you company's current state followed by defining the future state. This is more than a logical map of the process; it must also include physical maps. Whether your process is solely to provide a service (say, website development) or physical (say, manufacturing) there are logistical issues that complicate the process flow. Without fully understanding those nuances, future state processes will not reach the desired efficiencies.

For more information about process mapping fill out the form to the left and we will get in touch with you.

The other day a Latvian student contacted me for my views the connection between culture and success criteria—an important and intriguing topic. After working in Taiwan, Singapore, Korea, Japan, Israel, United States, and Canada, I wear many scars of both blatant and subtle cultural violations. I also know that within a culture one person's success is often another person's failure. So, after dispelling concerns about clicking on some random email link, I completed her survey (please feel free to take it yourself). In the process, I struck up a friendship with the student, Kristine Briežkalne, who is studying at Riga International School of Economics and Business Administration . She has some interesting views and presented me with a Venn diagram showing four frames to a project (business, client, project management, and growth perspectives) and how they intersected. As the diagram is part of her Master's thesis, I will let you ponder the how to label the overlapping areas (an eye-opening exercise).

There is a reason we do not teach classes on fixing failing projects. Many a cynic feels that we simply do not want to teach our trade, however, our reason is far nobler—we should be teaching prevention rather trying to create white knights to save the day. It is the same philosophy as building a fence at the cliff's edge rather than an emergency room at its base. Our language is replete with idioms telling us to look past the symptom and address problems at their root cause. 'An ounce of prevention versus a pound of cure' or 'a stitch in time saves nine.' Please, feel free to supply your own in the comments. Unfortunately, most of our businesses loathe this philosophy, waiting to address an issue until it is irrefutably broken.

A few weeks ago, I set out to write a post on the comparison of various organizational change management (OCM) methodologies and realized that would be a disservice to my readers. It would simply drag you down the path of implementation while failing to focus you on building the foundation. The pressure was too much and I have relented to numerous requests on making that comparison. The caveat is that juxtaposing these models is not comparing different varieties of oranges or even apples and oranges; we are surely comparing the peel to the fruit they contain. Hence, comparing methodologies like Kotter's model (the peel), Prosci's ADKAR (the core), and General Electric's Change Acceleration Process (the whole fruit) need a different approach.

It was such an innocuous question, "Working on an article; what is the biggest problem you see with project governance at orgs? Can you comment?" Can I comment? Really? That is like cheese to a mouse. Where could I start—bureaucracy, draconian process, poor executive sponsorship, disengaged leaders? Plenty of fodder, because they all lead to project failure. I fired off, "Creating an over bureaucratic morass stifling innovation & implementing process instead of cultivating leaders." Then the maelstrom started and it went directly to the gap between the executives and projects managers. Naomi Caietti, Robert Kelly and I had a great conversation. Most of the thread is below.